Well, this is another bucket-list project. Ever since I first heard it 22 years ago, James Newton Howard’s score to Waterworld has been one of my favorite scores of the 1990s. Bold, brash, thematic and epic, the soundtrack for this orchestral score got a lot of time in my CD player. Having worked on a few expanded reissues of JNH projects, I would keep asking about the possibility of doing an expanded Waterworld. At one point, I was told it was …

Just like with Baywatch, I had the good fortune to work on the soundtrack for another current film title, this time for Steve Jablonsky’s score to Transformers: The Last Knight. Once more, role was more of a coordination role between the studio, La-La Land Records, and the ad agency that was handling the artwork. Some of the workflow issues we had with Baywatch were resolved this time around, but there was a creative change at the last minute which required some …

It’s that time of year again, which means that the annual slew of Blake Neely album projects are coming out! First up is the new CW drama, Riverdale. Based on the Archie comics, but in a modern setting and definitely more adult subject matter, the show’s artwork has a high saturated look, with a neon-styled title treatment. Doing a little digging, the font was Centrum, so I went with that for the headers. Because there was a song album, we had …

Once again, I was fortunate to be involved with a current title, this time for Paramount’s Baywatch, featuring a score by Christopher Lennertz. My role was similar to the past current titles from Paramount, in a coordination role between the studio, La-La Land Records, and the ad agency that was handling the artwork. Some of that meant conforming the art files to fit La-La Land Records’ template – and some of those files really tested the limits of my computer! …

At this point, I had done the album art direction for numerous DC-related properties, but had yet to tackle one of the ‘vintage’ DC television shows. All of that changed with Wonder Woman. Producer Neil Bulk and La-La Land Records had previously employed me to do the artwork for the 7″ vinyl picture disc single released last year, so it was always expected that I would be doing the 3-disc CD release. The biggest problem we faced was a question of …

Back in 2013, La-La Land Records released Elmer Bernstein’s scores to The Shootist and The Sons of Katie Elder on one disc. The latter portion was the 1965 re-recording done for the LP, meaning that the original film score recorded still had yet to be released -until now. This new album is sourced from the original mono film music stem, as well as selected cues from an Electro-vox recording found in the archives. In addition to the score and source cues, we …

One of the great things about working on the various DC Universe Original Movie animated film soundtracks is that there’s a process in place that makes it a really smooth project, at least on the artwork end of things. I know who I need to contact at Warner Bros., they get me the various home video key art assets for the cover, as well as some production backgrounds, and then they send me a watermarked, time-code stamped DVD of the …

Working on a current film title is always exciting, for a number of reasons. With The Expendables 3, we got to see the film way early. Granted it wasn’t high art, but I found it entertaining. It also gave me a chance to get a sense of what scenes were important and what the design aesthetic used in the film itself is. Probably the biggest challenge for this project was the timeframe in which it had to take place – …

Until I was handed the project, I’d never heard of Wild is the Wind, the 1957 George Cukor film featuring a score by Dimitri Tiomkin. A majority of the projects I work on are relatively more recent, so it was fun to handle the artwork for another nearly 60-year old film. Paramount has a great online archive of their artwork assets, but occasionally a title will arise (like First Love) which isn’t yet in the system. In this case, the film was so …

Producing a single score soundtrack can be a lot of work. When it’s a trilogy box set, that’s like cramming three projects into one, and can be a bit overwhelming Thankfully, for The Naked Gun Trilogy, I worked with Neil S. Bulk to make this the best album possible. He spent an ungodly amount of time going through all the various recorded takes for each film, picking the proper version, and noting good alternate options for bonus tracks. We knew that we …